


unfair

by RaineyDay



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Author Projecting onto Taako (The Adventure Zone), Canon Trans Character, Gen, Gender Identity, Gender Issues, Introspection, Nonbinary Taako (The Adventure Zone), Queer Themes, Trans Taako (The Adventure Zone), non-canon trans character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:47:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28391895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RaineyDay/pseuds/RaineyDay
Summary: Lup doesn't wish that she was cis. She's proud of her identity. But sometimes she can't help but dwell on howunfairthis whole thing is.Taako wishes to be trans. Nobody ever told him that wishing to not be cis is a pretty good sign that one isn't actually cis to begin with.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 45





	unfair

**Author's Note:**

> so I'm so nervous to share this, but here! have a headcanon. it's kinda sorta background to my kidfic [Nesting](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27904012/chapters/68330500) but it stands alone and is mostly unrelated so I'm making it it's own thing.
> 
> it's projection time, babey... nonbinary/pangender Taako anyone?

It was so fucking unfair, Lup's opinion, that they had been born like this. Or, well it was unfair how they had developed, gender-wise.

In every other species, identical twins were _always_ assigned the same gender at birth. Made sense, obviously. They're _identical_ after all.

But there was something about how elven physical traits developed that was different somehow. She'd tried to understand it from the biology textbooks she'd borrowed (stolen sometimes) from libraries, but she'd never quite managed it.

Still, she understood enough to know that it was easy for elven DNA to mutate and for gender markers to change through the course of gestation. And it was a relatively common thing for elven twins to be assigned different genders at birth, even though they were otherwise identical.

Well, she said common, but really it wasn't _that_ frequent. Just... heard of. Like humans with red hair. Apparently that was some mutation or something, but people definitely knew that it could happen.

And it was drove her out of her mind that she had come so close to being born with a body that wouldn't make her dysphoric, but had missed out on it because elven twins worked differently than _every other species_ did.

She was proud of her identity as a trans woman, and she didn't _want_ to be cis, really. But that love of her identity had been forged in a lot of suffering. She loved herself because she had been forced to learn how to, or she couldn't have survived.

So if she could change the past and rewrite her history so that she would have been assigned female at birth, she couldn't say for sure that she'd do it.

But it was just one of those little ironies in life that represented how unlucky the two of them had been from the moment that they'd been born.

In retrospect, with their luck, of course that was how it had all worked out.

An upside came in the fact that it had been super easy to transition socially as kids, she supposed. Even if it was understood that elven twins _could_ be different genders, it wasn't expected by any means. So no one questioned it when she started presenting as female. Least, not until puberty anyway.

It was easy to say that they were identical twin sisters and have it be accepted as fact. (She never really noticed the way that Taako would occasionally twitch unhappily at the words, because it wasn't all the time and because surely her twin would tell her about those feelings if they were present? Surely Taako knew that she would understand. It was ridiculous to think anything else, so Lup never even really considered it.)

-

Lup had known that she was a girl for about as long as Taako could remember. It seemed that he had always known that he had a sister instead of anything else.

Taako had taken longer to figure out where he stood gender-wise.

At first, when he started questioning his gender, it felt rude. Rude to _Lup_ who was the only person he'd ever really worried about offending anyway. Because he'd never been nearly as bothered by being called 'girl' and 'miss' and 'she' as Lup had with 'boy' and 'mister' and 'he.' It wasn't that those terms _bothered_ Taako so much as the assumption that came with them.

He was so much more than those terms. His gender was everything that was on offer. The assumption that he was simply 'factory settings' rubbed him the wrong way and felt _so_ awful.

But it wasn't the same as it was for Lup. And he couldn't shake the thought that he had no right to compare their situations. _Yeah_ it felt shitty when people assumed shit about his gender, but he didn't have days where he could barely move out of bed because his body just felt _wrong._ And like, his body did feel wrong a lot, but it wasn't as bad as that. So what right did he have to complain?

When Lup was first starting to transition physically, sometimes, she would cry to him about how much she hated that she just looked like 'a man wearing a dress' and Taako would comfort her and reassure her that anyone who judged her wasn't worth her time. (He tried to tell her that it wasn't true, but she never believed him, so he defaulted to the 'fuck 'em all' attitude that had always come easier anyway.)

He wasn't used to keeping secrets from his sister, but he could never tell her that he was so fucking jealous of the way she looked on those days. How could he? How _dare_ he? He wasn't allowed to be envious of the body that made her feel _sick_ with how wrong it was.

But he absolutely was. The worst part- the part that made him feel like shit more than any other- is that he wanted to look like that for all the reasons that she hated looking like that. Lup wanted to be able to pass. She didn't want anyone to look at her and see anything other than a woman. She was proud of her identity and wasn't hiding anything, but she wanted to pass.

And Taako wanted to be a mystery. He wanted people to look at him and _know_ that he was queer. He wanted people to look at him and question what his gender was. He wanted to make people question _themselves._ He didn't hate being seen as a girl- even enjoyed it sometimes- but he couldn't stand being seen as _only_ a girl.

But it was harder for a girl to be seen as gender non-conforming. It was completely normal for a girl to wear pants. It was more obviously non-conforming for a guy to wear a skirt. It was totally possible for a girl to be gender non-conforming, but it was so unfairly common for GNC girls to be dismissed as 'tomboys' when they tried.

It was even harder for a girl to be seen as GNC when she refused to cut her hair short or eliminate skirts from her wardrobe.

Taako loved his hair, and put a lot of pride and care into it. And skirts were way too fun for him to stop wearing them just because society was stupid and thought 'long hair, skirts, and so-called feminine figure means cis girl.'

Did it make him a shitty person, that he so desperately wanted to be perceived as the thing his sister would do anything to _not_ be seen as?

He tried not to think about it, because he didn't know what he'd do if the answer turned out to be 'yes.'

God, it was so fucking unfair that they'd been born like this.


End file.
